Perhaps it’s the rash of daily reports about data breaches. Or the one-too-many compromises of protection of people’s passwords.

Whatever the cause, it appears that Americans are becoming increasingly interested in the use of biometrics to verify personal identity or to enable payments.

And the credit card industry has taken notice. Biometrics – the descriptive term for body measurements and calculations – is becoming more prevalent as a means to authenticate identity and enable proper access and control of accounts.

A recent survey of ~1,000 American adult consumers, conducted in Fall 2017 by AYTM Marketing Research for VISA, revealed that two-thirds of the respondents are now familiar with biometrics.

What’s more, for those who understand what biometrics entails, more than 85% of the survey’s respondents expressed interest in their use for identity authentication.

About half of the respondents think that adopting biometrics would be more secure than using PIN numbers or passwords. Even more significantly, ~70% think that biometrics would make authentication faster and easier – whether it be done via voice recognition or by fingerprint recognition.

Interestingly, the view that biometrics are “easier” than traditional methods appears to be the case despite the fact that fewer than one-third of the survey respondents use unique passwords for each of their accounts.

As a person who does use unique passwords for my various accounts – and who has the usual “challenges” managing so many different ones – I would have thought that people who use only a few passwords might find traditional methods of authentication relatively easy to manage. Despite this, the “new world” of biometrics seems like a good bet for many of these people.

That stated, it’s also true that people are understandably skittish about ID theft in general. To illustrate, about half of the respondents in the AYTM survey expressed concerns about the risk of a security breach of biometric data – in other words, that the very biometric information used to authenticate a person could be nabbed by others who could use it the data for nefarious purposes.

And lastly, a goodly percentage of “Doubting Thomases” question whether biometric authentication will work properly – or even if it does work, whether it might require multiple attempts to do so.

In other words, it may end up being “déjà vu all over again” with this topic …

It had to happen eventually: Facebook’s “faceprints” database activities are now the target of a lawsuit.

The suit, which has been filed in the state of Illinois, alleges that Facebook’s use of its automatic photo-tagging capability to identify people in images is a violation of Illinois’ state law regarding biometric data.

Facebook has been compiling faceprint data since 2010, and while people may choose to opt out of having their images identified in such a way, not surprisingly, that option is buried deep within the Facebook “settings” area where most people won’t notice it.

Moreover, the “default” setting is for Facebook to apply the automatic photo-tagging feature to all users.

Carlo Licata, the lead individual in the class-action complaint filed in Illinois, contends that Facebook’s practices are in direct conflict with the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. That legislation, enacted in 2008, requires companies to obtain written authorization from persons before collecting any sort of “face geometry” or related biometric data.

The Illinois law goes further by requiring the companies gathering biometric data to notify people about the practice, as well as to publish a schedule for destroying the information.

Here’s how the lawsuit states its contention:

“Facebook doesn’t disclose its wholesale biometrics data collection practices in its privacy policies, nor does it even ask users to acknowledge them. With millions of users in the dark about the true nature of this technology, Facebook [has] secretly amassed the world’s largest privately held database of consumer biometrics data.”

The response from Facebook has been swift – and predictable. It contends the lawsuit is without merit.

As much as I’m all for of individual privacy, I suspect that Facebook may be correct in this particular case.

Brave New World: Biometrics

For one thing, the Illinois law doesn’t reference social networks at all. Instead, it focuses on the use of biometrics in business and security screening activities — citing examples like finger-scan technologies.

As Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University notes, the Illinois law is “a niche statute, enacted to solve a particular problem. Seven years later, it’s being applied to a very different set of circumstances.”

And there’s this, too: The Illinois law deals with people who don’t know they’re giving data to a company. In the case of Facebook, it’s commonly understood user data is submitted with consent.

That may not be a particularly appealing notion … but it’s the price of gaining access to the fabulous networking functionality that Facebook offers its users – all at no expense to them.

And of course, millions of people have made that bargain.

That being said, there’s one nagging doubt that I’m sure more than a few people have about the situation: The folks at Facebook now aren’t the same people who will be there in the future. The use of faceprint information collected on people may seem quite benign today, but what about tomorrow?

The fact is, ultimately we don’t have control over what becomes the “tower of power” or who resides there. And that’s a sobering thought, indeed.

Reports from Japan are that facial-recognition technology is now being incorporated into mall signage wherein the age and gender of passersby are discerned before displaying “demographic appropriate” advertisements to them as they walk by.

NEC, a multinational electronics firm, is experimenting with biometric technology. the ability to scan faces to detect gender and age within a range of 10 years. Not only is the technology being tested in mall signage, but also in vending machinery where “helpful suggestions” will be made to consumers based on their presumed age and gender.

Joe Jensen, a manager at Intel’s Embedded Computing Division, sums it up like this: “As stores seek more competitive advantages over online retailers, digital signage has become a valuable technology for dispersing targeted and interactive content to shoppers.”

If gender-aware technology proves to be effective, does this mean that gin & tonics will be now offered to older consumers? At the end of a long day at the office, that could be a tantalizing option for businesspeople hitting Grand Central Station to catch the Long Island Railway home.

Or consider this picture: Legions of “Divine” impersonators(see above) descending upon malls or food kiosks, just to test how well the signage and vending machines can determine true age and gender!

Kidding aside, it’s really no surprise that digital technology with its ability to serve highly targeted, relevant content would eventually work its way into billboards and signage, historically the most “mass” of mass communications. Marketers crave statistical results, and they’re naturally going to gravitate to anything that provides those metrics – no matter how imprecise they might be.